The invention relates to a plastic profiled sealing element for household refrigeration appliances, such as freezers, refrigerators, freezer chests, freezer compartments, etc. the sealing element includes a sealing bellows having a hose-shaped cross section and is constructed of two side walls and a covering wall, the plastic material of the bellows having been set by means of a softener so as to be continuously flexible. The sealing element further includes an anchor member made of a plastic of the same or different material hardness, with the sealing bellows and the anchor member being connected with one another to form a unit.
Such profiled sealing elements are known extensively. The profiled sealing element according to German Pat. No. 1,425,493 may serve as an example. This patent discloses a seal made of an elastic, flexible material, such as rubber, plastic or other elastomers, so that these seals are able to deform and assure the required seal between the appliance and its door even if irregularities exist in the surface of these parts. The described seals may be provided with or without a permanent magnet inserted into the hollow bellows so as to attract a ferromagnetic material in the appliance if the door is placed against it in the closed positon. In this way the sealing member provides the seal itself as well as the lock and thus replaces a mechanical interlock.
The prior art profiled sealing elements could either be set to be flexible when cold or to resist migration of softener. The problem is here that flexibility at low temperatures can be realized only by means of softeners, which have the characteristic of dispersing or migrating considerably, while resistance to softener migration is produced by those softeners which are poorly flexible when cold.
The drawback of the latter setting is primarily that with decreasing temperatures, the elasticity of the profiled sealing element decreases, which may lead to embrittlement. If the softener content of the profiled sealing element is set to be flexible when cold, the particular tendency to migrate inherent in the softener employed must be considered a drawback, with the result that the associated lacquered surfaces of the appliance body or its polystyrene surfaces are subject to attack. Therefore the prior art sealing elements represents a compromise which has been accepted, with the necessary elasticity of the plastics employed for the production of the profiled element being obtained by using softeners which combine a tolerable migration behavior with a tolerable flexibility when cold. For example, extremely soft-set profiled sealing elements have been employed which were manufactured of a polyvinyl chloride that had been softened with a polymer softener. Depending on the requirements for such a profiled sealing element, the compromise accepted between flexibility when cold and resistance to softener migration was more or less tolerable for the intended purposes, but was afflicted in every case with the stated drawbacks so that in addition to the lacquer or polystyrene surfaces being attacked by migrated softener, it had to be expected that the material of the sealing element would become brittle sooner or later.